Cross a Pinnacle API allowance and two things do not happen: you are not billed extra, and the API does not quietly keep serving you. What you get is a 429 response, a Retry-After instruction when the window is short, and a decision to make. Here is what each limit does, and what to do when one bites.
The two kinds of limit
Every plan carries a rate ceiling. The REST snapshots plan runs at 10 requests a second, the combined plan at the same 10 with alerts included, and the high-volume plan at 30 a second, as the plan guide lists them, checked 2026-09-30. The free key and the SSE plan's REST side carry calendar caps instead: 20 requests a minute and 100 a day on the free key, with the SSE plan adding a 100-an-hour window on the same REST allowance.
The two kinds fail differently. A per-second ceiling resets in seconds. A daily cap resets tomorrow.
What crossing the line returns
Cross a rate ceiling and the API answers 429 Too Many Requests, normally with a Retry-After header naming the seconds to wait. The access checklist's rule is to respect Retry-After when provided, and when the exhausted window is unknown, to stop and investigate rather than retry blindly.
The daily cap is blunter. As the free key page puts it, a poller that hits the daily limit should stop rather than retry, because a 429 for the day cannot be waited out in seconds. Every retry fired at a day cap is one more wasted call against a window that will not open.
What it never does
The plans are prepaid with fixed allowances, and the pricing page lists no overage pricing, checked 2026-09-30. There is no meter running past your plan and no surprise line on the invoice. The flip side matters just as much: because no overage is priced, you should not assume requests past the allowance will be served at all. The ceiling is the plan.
A published per-second limit is also not a target. The pricing page warns that a published limit does not grant permission to run permanently at that ceiling; back off when instructed and review the account's current limits.
When the limit is telling you something
An occasional 429 in a match-day burst is normal. A daily cap exhausted by lunchtime, or a steady drip of 429s at peak, is the plan telling you the loop outgrew it. The measurement comes first: log the requests per second your poller actually uses at peak, then compare against the ceiling with headroom left for retries.
If the peak sits under about 7 a second, the 10-a-second plans carry it. Past that, the high-volume plan at 30 a second is the next step, at $229 a month as published. The plan guide maps each loop to its plan, and the free key remains the place to prove the loop before paying for the bigger ceiling.
A 429 is the plan working as designed, not a failure. Answer it with a wait, a stop, or an upgrade, in that order.